Can You Copyright An Idea?

Will Kriski - who has written for our blog before, and teaches online guitar lessons at http://onlineguitarcoaching.com - recently sent me an e-mail describing a ‘debate’ he was having with a fellow guitar instructor. Will said I could reprint our exchange for the benefit of the community:

Here’s the scenario, as sent to me by Will:

I do a bunch of free video guitar lessons that talk about various topics - eg. chords, soloing, CAGED system, chord tone soloing. I have links back to some of my own products. Someone is on my case about a free video lesson I did on using three 2nd inversion triads to visualize the fretboard for help with soloing, which is taught by a guy on his DVD. I don’t sell this method myself but since I did a video lesson explaining the concept, he is a bit peeved.

Do you know what the rules are regarding this type of issue?

This question concerns one of the most commonly misunderstood parts of copyright law. My response to this scenario was as follows:

Basically, what it comes down to is, you can’t copyright an idea. Unless you’ve personally used a tangible (keyword here) expression of his original idea, you’re well within your rights. For example, you can’t use his diagrams, any of his media (sound, video, etc), or even his exact wording, etc. in your tutorials.

But, I assume from what you’ve told me that you didn’t use any of those things, and instead just explained his idea. In which case there is no problem…

Section 102 (b) of U.S. copyright law explicitly states that copyright does NOT extend to any “idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery, regardless of the form in which it is described, explained, illustrated, or embodied in such work”. Copyright only applies to 1) original work 2) fixed to a tangible medium. So the sound recording of an idea is copyrighted (as a sound recording), but the idea expressed in the recording is NOT copyrighted. The visual representation of the idea is copyrighted (as a visual art) but NOT the idea it expresses. And so on.

Unless there’s more to the story, it’s as clean cut as that!

Of course, this is not to be construed as legal advice, but you already know that. I hope some of you might find this conversation helpful, and as always, we welcome your music business-related questions!